What we’re about
"Classic lit" goes beyond standard 19th-century English novels. We look for, read, and discuss works of fiction (usually novels, but occasionally plays) that have endured in their genre. The time-frame may be thirty years or three hundred - yes, there ARE modern classics (looking at you, Don DeLillo). Now, that doesn't mean we don't love 19th-century English novels. We just want to challenge ourselves to discover authors and works beyond that category.
We have two basic rules for book selection: nothing over 400 pages, and nothing out of print that is not available for free online. (Personally, I have a "no Russian literature" rule, but the page limit generally takes care of that.)
As of February 2025, we will meet via Zoom every two months:
February, April, June, August, October, December.
Upcoming events (1)
See all- Pedro Páramo - Juan Rulfo (1955)Needs location
The text is available on internetarchive.org. There is also a 2023 translation by Douglas Weatherford which I recommend.
Pedro Páramo, often acclaimed as the finest novel from a Mexican writer, showcases the roots of Mexican culture and its beliefs on afterlife through deeply complex characters, spirituality, and a continual transition between realms or dimensions that encompass a nonlinear chronology. Juan Preciado promises his mother on her deathbed to meet Preciado's absentee father for the first time in the village of Comala. When he arrives there, he finds a literal ghost town populated by spectral characters. During the course of the novel, these ghostly inhabitants reveal details about life and afterlife in Comala, including that of Preciado's reckless father, Pedro Páramo, and his pervasive influence in the town. But is Preciado really haunted, or is he suffering from mental illness? Can we really tell which characters are living and which are dead?
Initially, the novel was met with cold critical reception and sold only two thousand copies during the first four years; later, however, the book became highly acclaimed and was a key influence on Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez said that he felt blocked as a novelist after writing his first four books and that it was only his life-changing discovery of Pedro Páramo in 1961 that opened his way to the composition of his masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Moreover, García Márquez claimed that he "could recite the whole book, forwards and backwards." Jorge Luis Borges considered Pedro Páramo to be one of the greatest texts written in any language; he included it in his project to create a library of 100 works of great literature and write a foreword for each: Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library | Open Culture.
In 2024 the book was adapted into a film that is now streaming on Netflix. tyer
